I saw a few doctors today. The squeamish may not wish to read on…
Month: May 2005
Sorry, Wrong Number; Plus, An Interesting Quote From An Interesting Site
Laura brings on the amusing news: 666 may be the wrong number. I was poking around on a website with a post about this, when I found one very interesting site, and a link to another one. The first quote, from near the bottom of this page, is this: People didn’t even want to believe Elvis, who died young and loved Gospel music, was taken by drugs. They kept seeing him everywhere. How much more so Jesus living in his apocalyptic-minded day and age and dying as he did? Jesus himself may have been predicting the final apocalyptic judgment soon, …
PoCo and Shoah: Books #12 & 13
No humor intended. Well, not good humor anyway. I have two more books to review for my Lunar New Year of reading, both of them very famous: Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale and Edward Said’s Orientalism. Both of these books have been regarded as revolutionary, and both were fascinating. But I’m not sure what I can say about each that will add anything to what’s already been said, which in both cases in voluminous. Still, I’ll take a stab and presenting my take of them: Book #12: Orientalism by Edward Said, with an Afterword dated 1992. This book, especially, …
Global Warming Deniers Beware!
From Bruce Sterling’smost recent Viridian email, a good link on refuting Global Warming denier’s myths. Check it out so you’re well equipped for your next “discussion” with a meathead. UPDATE: And from the same email, here’s a fascinating piece from Stewart Brand on what’s due for change in the environmentalist mainstream.
Instead of Pinochets
Well, some of you might recall a Friday 5 post I made a while back, which led to some comments among which Mike made a suggestion for a short story. I told him: If I so write it up and sell it, I owe you some beer. Well, Mike, I don’t suggest holding your breath quite yet, but I do think I’m almost done with the first part of that if-then statement. (Selling’s always the harder part, innit?) Even though I’ve been trying to catch up on New Sophists’ stuff, and to read Kat’s manuscript, I’ve been traveling, which means …
A link and a meme
First, the meme: Your brain: 100% interpersonal, 80% visual, 120% verbal, and 100% mathematical! Congratulations on being 400% smart! Actually, on my test, everyone is. The above score breaks down what kind of thinking you most enjoy doing. A score above 100% means you use that kind of thinking more than average, and a score below 100% means you use it less. It says nothing about how good you are at any one, just how interested you are in each, relatively. A substantial difference in scores between two people means, conclusively, that they are different kinds of thinkers. My test …
Deanimator!
Religion = Politics?
Over at Epiphany in C, bad news: the purge has begun. This is bad, even if it is fringe.
Brunner? Uh, sure, I don’t mind.
I am: John Brunner His best known works are dystopias — vivid realizations of the futures we want to avoid. Which science fiction writer are you? And here I thought I was Gord Sellar. (But then again, the quiz asks which science-fiction writer you are, not which would-be science-fiction writer you are.) Ah well, if I have to be any other SF writer, Brunner’s a good choice. But the cravat has got to go.
ObMeme
I hate these things but I couldn’t resist. Via Verba Vita Est: 1) My uncle: I’ve lost count. 2) Never in my life: will I read all the books I own. 3) When I was five: I was very small for my age. Really. 4) High school was: a nightmarish experience that taught me that while the idea of all people being equal is nice, it’s not really true. 5) I will never forget: the first poem I ever wrote. 6) I once met: Dewey Redman. He sat with me during breaks at a gig he played with Jane Bunnett …